While it’s easy to romanticize blind wine tasting, it isn’t an art form or a party trick, and it’s definitely not a guessing game. “I used to be a super feelings- and emotion-driven taster, but after two failed attempts at the Master Sommelier exam, I shifted to a more data-driven approach,” says Jonathan Eichholz, MS, an educator at GuildSomm.
“It’s not very creative what we have people do in a tasting exam,” confirms Tim Gaiser, MS, the author of Message in the Bottle: A Guide to Tasting Wine and an instructor at the Napa Valley Wine Academy (NVWA). “But what it is is a skill in which we’re requiring people to use a framework and neurologically do the same things over again and assess what’s different and how they’re representing that internally.”
Learning how to do that successfully can be a physically and mentally demanding pursuit that’s both incredibly rewarding and extremely humbling. The reasons for attempting to master this skill are myriad, but whatever the end goal, the journey is a long one.
“It’s just one of those things that you cannot rush,” says Peter Marks, MW, the vice president of the NVWA and the current panel chair of The Institute of Masters of Wine tasting exam. He points to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, which argues that you need 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at a complex skill. Looking back, Marks calculated that he did indeed spend 10,000 hours studying for the MW exam before he passed.
At every stage in such a long journey, it’s worth taking stock of your progress to assess what’s working and what needs improvement. The best advice for improving blind tasting skills often comes from the community of like-minded wine professionals that have gone through this unique endeavour. “In wine, everything is better achieved through community,” says Claudia Chamberlain, a regional sales manager for Jackson Family Wines and an instructor at Capital Wine School, who is currently studying for both the MW and MS exams. “It takes a village to be able to get across the line to that master-level tasting.”
In that spirit, expert tasters from across the industry share their best advice for becoming a better blind taster.
Stop blind tasting—at first
“One doesn’t train for a marathon by running lots of marathons,” says Eichholz. A vast amount of learning is required before you attempt to blind taste a wine.
At its core, blind tasting is a practical application of theory, so you need to start with a strong knowledge base. Before you approach a wine, “You have to have at your fingertips the knowledge about grapes and regions and quality levels and styles and acidity levels and all of those sorts of things so that you can look at your notes and go, ‘If we have ABCD … it’s most likely going to fit this,’” says Christopher Martin, MW, the director of education at the Wine Scholar Guild (WSG).
Marks recommends another step before blind tasting, particularly for students working toward the MW exam: practice writing good tasting notes. “That can often be done [by writing] dry tasting notes, so you don’t have to go out and buy all the wines,” he says. “You should know what a Pinot Noir from Carneros tastes like versus one from Vosne-Romanée and be able to differentiate those.”
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